World War II recalled in VE program at UGA

Friday

In recordings and in person, World War II veterans recounted war experiences in a special program on the University of Georgia campus Thursday.

"VE + 70" commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe - VE Day, May 8, 1945.

The event, in an auditorium of UGA's Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries, also featured a UGA history lesson, thanks to University Archivist Emeritus Steven Brown. Brown showed in photographs and documents how UGA was transformed during the war as much of the campus was given over to the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School and other military programs.

The student body, what was left of it, also jumped into the war effort, said Brown. He showed a series of photographs from the remarkable collection of Henry Wallace Richter, a student who took pictures for both the Pandora yearbook and the Red & Black student newspaper in that era.

One photo showed two female students painting fake stockings on their legs - a wartime measure adopted to save nylon for the war effort.

UGA students also collected scrap metal, rubber and other materials for recycling. They also pushed the sale of war bonds, and raised enough money to buy a fleet of jeeps.

"Anything to back the war effort was going on on campus," Brown said.

UGA actually began offering an aviation program during the war, training civilian pilots who'd later undertake tasks later such as ferrying newly built military planes to their desti

nations in the States.

There was also the University of Georgia School of Parachutes - a fraudulent enterprise, and not at UGA.

Brown has talked to many veterans of the Navy Pre-Flight School, and every one of them complained bitterly about how much they hated it, he said. They had to swim the length of an Olympic swimming pool and back, underwater, for example.

But one World War II veteran at Thursday's event scoffed at the Navy trainee's misery.

"Those cadets that complained about Athens were never at Fort Benning," said Claude Williams, who spoke in a recording and in person as part of a panel of four veterans.

Williams was in Germany after the war in Europe was won but wasn't quite over; soldiers were still being injured and even killed, such as the officer killed by a sniper across the street from Williams as they made their way cautiously through a German town.

Another Athens veteran, Ed Benson, told in a recording of his introduction to war. A British air crew was sleeping beneath their aircraft when the plane took a direct hit.

"Everybody was killed, every single person," said Benson, who was just 20 then and had never seen a dead person.

An officer gave him his orders then: "Lieutenant, get your crew together and get these people buried," he said.

The panel Thursday also included veterans Phil Pollock, who was in the Battle of the Bulge, and Thelma Leys, who tried twice to enroll in the Women's Army Corps, the WACS.

She succeeded the second time when she was old enough, in 1942. Her first assignment was in Bangor, Maine.

From November to the middle of March, "I didn't see bare ground a day," she said.

The government in its wisdom moved them after a few months, she said; they thought they were going to Iceland, though the Army never said where you were going, they just said, "Go."

But as their train rolled on, they knew Iceland was wrong; it kept getting warmer.

"I wound up at Camp Polk, Louisiana, which is about as far South as you can get," she said. Leys later wound up in another place where it gets pretty warm, Albany, Ga.

You can see some of Wallace Richter's World War II UGA photos by Googling "UGA Wallace Richter."

You can hear oral histories of many World War II veterans at www.witnesstowar.org.